A second-order soundfield microphone with improved polar pattern shape

摘要

The soundfield microphone is a compact tetrahedral array of four figure-of-eight microphones yielding four coincident virtual' microphones; one omnidirectional and three orthogonal pressure gradient microphones. As described by Gerzon, above a limiting frequency approximated by f_c = πc/r, the virtual microphones become progressively contaminated by higher-order spherical harmonics. To improve the high-frequency performance, either the array size must be substantially reduced or a new array geometry must be found. In the present work an array having nominally octahedral geometry is described. It samples the spherical harmonics in a natural way and yields horizontal virtual microphones up to second order having excellent horizontal polar patterns up to 20 kHz.